Handmade Electronic Music

I start out first with a recent purchase, a book called Handmade Electronic Music. This is a really nice introduction to making your own musical gadgets. The author starts out with the basics, get’s into circuit ‘bending’ (modifying existing electronic gizmos), and then moves toward more complex work using CMOS chips.

Nothing here is rocket science, so don’t expect to walk away being able to make a full synth. However, it does cover introductory to moderate level skills, and gets into some nice projects for the guitar heros out there. If you are a musician and wants to learn how those distortion pedals work, this is a good starting point.

Unlike a lot of electronics books out there, this one is very readable. The author covers components just enough, and doesn’t swamp you with extended explanations of how the chips work (there are other books to do that). In the end, you end up making fun sounding stuff really quickly.

In addition, I am pleased to report that this book was well edited. I’ve yet to find a typo in the text or schematics. Even better, this author uses commonly available, inexpensive, non-retired parts, and also includes Radio Shack and Jameco part numbers. Very handy, especially for people who don’t want to get into electronics “whole hog”. Most of the projects can be made with about $20 in parts (tops).

CMOS Cookbook

Once you have played around with Handmade Electronic Music for a while you’ll want to more about the nitty-gritty behind the CMOS chips used in many of those projects. The classic CMOS Cookbook is a good place to start.

This book, originally written in the late seventies, and reviewed/revised in the late nineties, is a great intro to CMOS logic chips. Basically, CMOS chips are logic devices. Feed a signal in, they do some work, and out is your result. Inverters are a basic example of a logic gate (send in a 1, get 0 in the output). There are also things like decade counters (used for the “KITT Car” scanning light effect, among other things), and dividers (put in one frequency, get base 2 divisions of that frequency on different output pins).

The beauty of CMOS is that is still comes in a basic DIP package (those larger “chip” sizes which are easier for experimenters to use), they have a wide voltage range (about 5V to 15V), and require very little power to run (versus TTL logic chips). Plus, they are a long-used technology (since the early 70′s) so there’s a lot of info out there. As an added bonus, they are dirt cheap. In single units most are in the 25 cent range (if you purchase from a larger supplier, like Allied). This means you can destroy a few without going broke.

The CMOS Cookbook is a great introduction to CMOS, and also a solid introduction to logic circuits. There are lists of the most common chips, and what they do. There are sample projects of all sorts. And there are excellent descriptions of the different logic states, and how you can use them.

The author, Don Lancanster, has written more books and articles than I can count, and offers a lot of very useful real-world advice. In addition, since the book was written thirty (!!!) years ago, you don’t get a lot of heavy (and complicated) microcontroller/microprocessor stuff. I love the microcontroller stuff, but I think it’s best for beginners to understand, at least a little, how the most basic logic chips work. Heck, you can make your own computer, with RAM and ROM, with the CMOS line.

If you are working with CMOS, which is pretty popular in the analog/digital synth circuit, then the CMOS Cookbook is well worth your time.

Don also has a TTL Cookbook, which I also own. However, since I don’t do much TTL, and it’s more of a pain to work with, I’d advise sticking with CMOS. Most of the TTL logic chips have been re-created with CMOS anyway, so why bother with TTL? (I know, there are reasons. But for most homebrew people, CMOS is the way to go. It’s newer, too! LOL).

Evil Genius Books

The TAB company (an old tech publisher) has recently been putting out a whole line of “Evil Genius” books. We own two of them, one on microcontrollers (PICs), and this one (Spy Gadgets).

These books are really a mixed bag for me. On one hand, they are easy to read, pretty chatty in style, and have some interesting projects. On the other hand, I’m concerned about their editing. I can’t speak for the entire series, but the “Spy Gadgets” book is filled with errors. Now, there’s nothing earth-shattering, but there’s enough to make a beginner’s life a lot harder. For example: mislabeled parts, text not matching schematics, illogical schematic flows, and glossing over of some critical components.

If you are a beginner picking up electronics, be sure to have an experienced person look over your shoulder. If you don’t have someone to help, check their forums for updates, and check the data sheets on the key components (at least the pinouts and common ratings for off-board components).

Again, I really like these books for the ideas, but I don’t think they are “tight” enough to provide a solid introduction to electronics. Maybe that’s not their goal, but they should at least be as accurate as possible.
With this I have a couple of words of advice for electronics books writers:

• Use common parts. If you can’t get it from 3 major vendors, don’t use it.
• Include options and cross references. Beginners don’t know that a 74C114 can be replaced by a CD40106.
• Proofread. Proofread. Proofread. Proofread.
• Follow industry standard schematic conventions. I like big bold schematics, but I don’t like non-standard parts symbols.
• Where possible, have your schematics flow top-bottom, left-right. (At least for Western readers.) A big annoyance with the Spy book was that some schematics went logical left-right, while others went right-left. Very confusing!
• Include complete parts lists. This makes it so much easier for people to order everything at once, and save on shipping. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to pay $8 to ship a 25 cent part. (This is one of the reasons I try and keep a tight inventory, and triple-check before ordering parts. Better to buy a little too much than to sit for a week waiting on something to come in.)